


paraesthesia

by Alias (anafabula)



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: ASMR, Autistic Peter Lukas, Banned Together Bingo 2020, Bastards in Love, Cis Peter Lukas, Complicated Relationships, Cuddling, Domestic fluff ensues, Established Relationship, Fellas: It Is Gay, Fluff without Plot, Gender Issues, Hair Braiding, Inappropriately Soft Invocation of Lonely Powers, M/M, Peter and Elias are between divorces, Trans Elias Bouchard, Trans Jonah Magnus, Trans Male Character, being GNC to own the cis, but make it at least slightly antagonistic, but: he, forgot that doesn’t necessarily go without saying, i can have little a detailed appearance headcanons. as a treat, previously:, the meta-discomfort of being comfortable with casual intimacy, the mortifying ordeal of knowing your husband, token cisgender:
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-15
Updated: 2020-12-15
Packaged: 2021-03-10 21:41:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,701
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28084080
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anafabula/pseuds/Alias
Summary: Peter hates that he knows this, actually: how soft Elias’s hair is between his fingers, how much work Elias puts into making it that way, how he relaxes when it’s in someone else’s hands nevertheless.Or at least when it’s in Peter’s, anyway. Elias has Watched him wonder which option would even be worse, to be disposable or unique in that.
Relationships: Elias Bouchard | Jonah Magnus/Peter Lukas, Elias Bouchard/Peter Lukas
Comments: 15
Kudos: 52
Collections: Banned Together Bingo 2020





	paraesthesia

**Author's Note:**

  * For [segfaultvicta](https://archiveofourown.org/users/segfaultvicta/gifts).



> Prompt: “`Normalizes Trans Lives`”, but make it GG this time. I am… fairly sure this is a break from my usual ratings experimentation, even. 
> 
> Seg helped me with a great deal of the He Brain Too Scream involved in writing something this soft and gay, as well as the inciting reason I forced myself to try, so: here. Take a gay.

Elias Bouchard had always had deceptively difficult hair. Thinned slightly by exogenous testosterone and mediocre luck at this point, but no more workable for it; and fine, obnoxiously so, prone both to going lank at earliest opportunity and escaping virtually any attempt at order. It was, and remains, an ordeal to care for if one actually cares about the exercise. 

It falls below his shoulder blades, by now, and he takes care of it extremely well. (It’s not just about spite, in terms of motivation—he does like how he looks, that’s rather the point—but that’s never exactly hurt him either. Long enough to braid easily himself is more than sufficient to put off people he has no interest in ever seeing comfortable, and that’s another point in favor, for the time being.) Pinned back enough to work without disturbance, it makes for a loose cascade of dark curls, threaded increasingly with a variety of grays and—he is, of course, more than vain enough to wonder, and more than capable of objectively finding out—if anything more eye-catching for it. 

It makes Peter distinctly uncomfortable as well, Elias is peaceably aware, in a very different way from the kind of interchangeable mortal would-be annoyances he’s so pleasantly vindictive toward. Peter disdains of the amount of work Elias puts into it (and what of _that_ is new, really), but his heart almost isn’t in it, too taken up with the fact that it wears on him to know at all. It wears on him to know the routines of it, multiple days’ worth, the base of reference earned by casual intimacy that means he knows it’s not the same every day in the first place; to know how unerringly two specific locks at Elias’s temples spring up into intentional-looking ringlets when damp; to know the texture with his hands; to know he likes this. It’s soft. 

Peter disdains the work involved but he _hates_ how much he likes the result. It’s a low roil of comfortably-banked contradiction, at this point, the way he knows this. 

Elias sleeps with his hair braided; he likes making Peter do that for him. Peter likes it, too, the amount of touch and Elias’s reactions and the ostensible productive end involved to half absolve him of this, and still hates that he does. He has never yet been sure whether the pinpricks of affective warmth he feels at times like these are too perilous to be productive; Elias, with his own highly-informed opinion, expects he never will. 

“Why do you even bother,” Peter barely-asks: too flat to be irritated, but evoking it a little nonetheless. Not the first time he’s voiced the thought by any means, but there’s a slightly different mental cant to the question than previous. Elias, after a moment of consideration, decides to indulge him accordingly. 

Bouchard—the one who’d never had another name, more or less—had never quite been able to come to terms with it. Couldn’t bring himself to wear it short enough to curtail the kind of allegedly innocent ‘misunderstandings’ that still came, would seemingly always come, with his bone structure and general build, not once he’d actually made it through the gauntlet of telling enough of the NHS what it wanted to hear; couldn’t not resent everything that left him with looking in mirrors either. The result was a frankly embarrassing state that, on the one hand, he knew better than to cultivate, and, on the other, he’d been taught better than chiefly by his mother and thus lost anything positive about the remembering. When Elias first got his own hands on him he’d thought the mess of his hair was _straight_ , for Christ’s sake; just an absolutely abysmal level of neglect. A synecdoche for the body being wasted on him alone if anything was. 

Elias can do better, obviously. 

He says, albeit perhaps more softly than intended, “When he was the one responsible for his body Elias Bouchard promised himself, repeatedly, that he’d grow his hair out again someday. He’d worn it long as a child and never since, for the obvious reason, and on some level it galled him to let that go. To… allow anyone else to make one more decision about his body once he could avoid it. But he could never quite take the initiative in practice.” Elias pauses. “Resented that it mattered to him at all too much to act on the fact, I think. Couldn’t really care for himself to save his life. So it seemed appropriate.”

He can feel Peter blink. “I will never understand you,” he mutters, and then, quickly enough to prove a great amount of familiarity in itself, “Not a request.” He’s thinking about mourning, a not unpredictable interpretation that still makes Elias distinctly uncomfortable to contemplate secondhand. Given the sort of prior experience he’s working from Elias does not appreciate the comparison. 

Though Peter has also gone back to braiding, soundless movements sending delightful waves of prickling, tingling sensation across Elias’s scalp as intended, so. Elias will allow it.

He is by no means bad at it. He has practice, for one thing, and can see what he’s doing from the traditional angle. He’s not as _fast_ at it as Elias, but that’s arguably an asset. 

It’s independent of all else and not in any way his doing, this time, that Elias reacts like this to having his hair touched but unpredictably. It doesn’t happen under his own hands, which is really for the best; that would be both undignified and distracting. As is and absent any real ability to anticipate on his own part, he blinks, shivers, makes involuntary noises about which Peter has made the obvious comparison, not without a truly obnoxious sort of humor, to a bird. There’s an irregular but profoundly enjoyable feeling to it, whether focused on the relevant part of his scalp or sustained enough to trickle pinpricks of bright electric sensation down his spine. 

Elias does not tell him any more of this than absolutely necessary, holding himself straight and still between the moments of involuntary full-body trembling. It’s humiliating, obviously, in a familiar, stable way. He could play down the reactions, he’s aware, but he’s not particularly inclined. He likes it. It wouldn’t bear commenting on. 

“ _Brute,_ ” he snaps instead, when a few fine hairs catch on Peter’s hand and pull, _hard_. (It’s better than yelping, which is the appropriate impulse; as if in intensity proportionate to the more regular, tremulous and shapeless feeling, that _hurt_.)

“If you could handle this so much better, why ask me to?” This isn’t the first time Peter’s asked _that_ , either. Elias would be well enough aware that Peter likes making him say it even without not having to guess in the first place. 

“I— Ah!” Poor timing, there, but also a live demonstration of what he’s less than inclined to say. He’s still shivering slightly when he starts speaking again, the vagaries of his nervous system opting for pleasant inconvenience even more than usual. “I— value the element of unpredictability.”

“So you can have something to complain about?” 

“That too,” Elias says. The sigh in the middle spoils it, a bit. He doesn’t mind that as much as he should. 

Peter’s near finishing up at this point; Elias would be able to tell from the distance and angle of his hands even if he weren’t intermittently watching his own back. He relaxes the tense set of his shoulders in anticipation. This bothers Peter slightly, as well: that he can finish tying off the braid and loop it around his hand once for leverage but when he jerks Elias back bodily it won’t surprise him. 

It doesn’t bother him enough to _stop_ , though, and the breath’s knocked out of him when his back hits Peter’s chest just the same. He’s warm and dense and significantly more pleasant to press oneself to, Elias thinks without judgment, than Elias himself, but Peter lets go of his hair and snakes the arm in question around Elias’s waist instead all the same. 

“Awful,” he says, without any need for there to be conventionally obvious affection in it. “You’re awful.” 

They’re both resigned to knowing Peter hardly needs to see at this point in order to know exactly what expression Elias has on his face, so Elias turns in further toward Peter and tucks his smile agreeably into the junction of his neck and shoulder and forces him to tolerate that as well instead. 

“If you fall asleep on me, I swear…”

Elias sleeps with passing rarity at this point, but it does seem to add to the impact when he lets himself. Which is no small feat; even aside from self-preservation, there’s always more to _See_ that he values far more highly than routine common sense. 

Almost always. Temporarily drawn into Forsaken like this, amicably present under the reach of Peter’s god over him in particular by proxy, he can generally See elsewhere if he tries but he does have to try, an inverse of the norm. It would be intolerable at length, but like this it’s… restful, the dull grey press of uncanny power around him muffling the urgency of anything but how warm its creature is. It would be intolerable without that—without Peter and his frankly absurd body heat and the fact that this is, by definition, self-sustaining and comfortable for him in such an environment, where anyone not themselves taken with the One Alone is made to cry out for any kind of living company—but that’s rather the point.

“Be a less pleasant sensory experience if it troubles you so much, then,” Elias says. It’s not a particularly clever rebuttal, and a bit muffled. 

“I _will_ pick you up and throw you on the bed if you don’t get off me yourself, Elias,” Peter says. 

Elias supposes that would qualify as a less pleasant sensory experience, in fact, but it’s also an offer to get around his own lassitude without further expenditure of effort on his own part. On balance Elias benefits regardless, so he ignores him. Presumably he’ll be woken up whenever Peter gets around to keeping his word.

**Author's Note:**

> Comments will be treasured, and then weaponized against the Brain Problems that made this fic a five-month-long undertaking


End file.
